Caine (after
“Dark Angel”) comes to a farmstead with a half-brother’s
letters. He is directed to the Silver Dollar Saloon where he is arrested. The
farmer claims his half of the reward and is killed by the sheriff, who shoots
Caine as well.

A Chinese lady
picks up wounded Caine and nurses him on her farm. She telegraphs her brother
in San Francisco, who arrives by stagecoach with two strongarm men to trade
Caine for the siblings’ father, a writer imprisoned in China. Caine
“will not be bound”, but accedes to her wish.

The sheriff is
killed by the lady after shooting her brother. Caine departs with the
writer’s book.

One of the great
seaside Westerns like Flame of Barbary Coast or One-Eyed Jacks,
especially vivified by Doniger’s direction. An allegory of the
writer’s life.

Return to the AlamoMcCloud

On the graveyard
shift one lengthy night, Chief Clifford and much of the staff are out with the
flu, the American Brotherhood Movement is blowing up buildings, Chris Coughlin
is writing a story with a feminist angle on the NYPD, a robbery suspect's
brother (an addict) tries to break him out (and both are sons of an Albany
bigwig named Foreman) by kidnapping the Acting Watch Commander (Sgt.
Broadhurst), McCloud pulls in New York's top drug dealers in a citywide search
for a junkie whose addicted newborn infant needs urgent treatment, and Sgt.
Phyllis Norton is the Acting Deputy Watch Commander.

The tour de
force script is a spécialité de la maison. As Foreman, Brad
Dexter’s resemblance to Edward Arnold advances with great rapidity the
allusion to Meet John Doe. An unspecified “big move on
Albany” is menaced by his sons’ peccadillo, and his payoffs from
the New York dealers for advance knowledge of raids are revealed, at least to
the audience.

In all fairness
to Sgt. Broadhurst, it must be said that Chief Clifford himself was kidnapped
once (in “Who Says You Can't Make Friends in New York City?”). This
is Sgt. Broadhurst’s second stint in command. The earlier fiasco
(“This Must Be the Alamo”) is briefly discussed in terms of
“a shambles,” but McCloud defends him, and Chief Clifford allows
later on that “Joe Broadhurst is a good man.”

Sgt. Phyllis
Norton’s commonsensicality, and a word of wisdom from Chief
Clifford’s secretary Gladys (Jeanne Cooper), come to her rescue in the
crisis, even though Sgt. Norton’s regular duties consist of filework (she
confuses IBM and ABM) and supplying coffee and donuts. It’s at Chris
Coughlin’s insistence that she’s made Acting Deputy Watch
Commander, and Coughlin is still disappointed.

The American
Brotherhood Movement is said to have “an unstated cause,” but the
bomber who strikes headquarters (in the uniform of a Hudson Power Company
employee) is merely vexed over traffic tickets.

As in the
previous Broadhurst epic, headquarters is invaded, but not this time by an
armed band. Foreman’s aide-de-camp Parkes (Larry Storch) and son
Marty (Robert Weaver), a heroin addict whose habit led his brother Hoyt (Mark
Wheeler) to join him in an armed robbery of a liquor store ironically owned by
one of their father’s holding companies—Parkes and Marty bring
handcuffed Sgt. Broadhurst back to headquarters to secure Hoyt’s release,
but find the building empty because of the bomber’s note eked out by further
information from his girlfriend, Samantha Johnson.

The actress
playing this part is presumably Marjorie Battles (billed as
“Lady”), certainly not Stefanie Powers, who played a weathergirl of
the same name in “Butch Cassidy Rides Again”.

Doniger’s
direction is rigorous, skillful and faultless.

The Adventure of the
Black FalconEllery Queen

This amazing
study of what Professor Weber calls “the second Thirty Years War”,
1914-1945, imagines all the depredations inflicted on Germany at the Armistice
and its subsequent re-staging of the march through Flanders fields as a
doughboy absconding with a minor vineyard (Der Schwarze Falke), opening
a nightclub, and murdered by a greedy partner whose real name is Morgenstern,
providing the clue. It all takes place around a live radio broadcast from Nick
& Eddie’s nightclub, and is about as fine an example of this
series’ powers of abstraction as can be wished.

Tab Hunter in a
boiled shirt and mustard sweater backstage waiting to go on as a jazz pianist
gives an unusual picture of the age. Roddy McDowall plays an American passing
himself off as a German mindreader solo, in technical parlance “a head
act with no gaff”.

The Adventure of the Wary
WitnessEllery Queen

The false witness
of the title is brought in to a murder trial first to advance an impossible
solution, but finally to be murdered herself before
testifying, and leave the case moot. That is the theory behind the proceeding,
anyway.

To some extent,
naturally, and in the hands of the very expert parodist Peter S. Fischer, this
is a deliberate reflection of Perry Mason. A former Los Angeles D.A.
once opined that a famous case would not turn out like one of Perry
Mason’s with a surprise ending, not realizing perhaps that he was
repeating words spoken by Hamilton Burger.

The Adventure of the
Judas TreeEllery Queen

This is the one
about the very sick traitor who’s found hanging
adorned with branches of the specimen. There is a question, most amusingly, of
a missionary who might not be all he seems, and the victim’s wife is
leaving him for his doctor.

The solution is
too good not to be described. The murder is a suicide dressed up by the
absconding couple, who were meant to be framed by it in the first place for
vengeance.